That they just can not say no to everything and try to derail
everything.

Waterloo
March 21st, 2010 at 4:59 pm by David Frum | No Comments |Share
Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing
legislative defeat since the 1960s.

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives
may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote
with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about
November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate
goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill
is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this
debacle now.

So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes
the hard lesson:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to
conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike,
say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut,
we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no
compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be
Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected
with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the
Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in
1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and
also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap
between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big.
The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s
Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage
Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican
counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have
leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative
views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive
enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without
expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if
Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes
could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more
for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind
policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes
to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And
even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a
repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and
they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But
they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had
whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making
was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants
to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom
your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their
grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our
overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by
mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information,
overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to
represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and
radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in
government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination.
When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was
intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say –
but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail.
If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and
negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get
less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less,
and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a
huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners
and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even
more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers
on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the
cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.